How to use the printer test page
- Pick a test and your paper size. The preview shows exactly what will print, on US Letter (8.5 × 11 in) or A4 (210 × 297 mm).
- Print it at 100%. Press Print to print straight from the browser, or Download PDF for a vector file you can print from any PDF viewer, keep, or send to someone else's printer. In the print dialog choose Actual size, 100% or Scale: 100, never Fit to page, and turn off headers and footers; "Print at exactly 100%" under the buttons has the steps for Chrome, Firefox, Safari and PDF viewers. Print sends screen colors and the driver picks the inks; the PDF carries CMYK values for the ink patches.
- Look at the sheet and tick what you see in step 2: white lines, streaks, a missing color, faded print, jagged lines, smears, cut-off edges. Say whether your printer is an inkjet or a laser, and add the lengths you measured on the scale bars if size matters.
- Read the fixes. Each problem gets its likely cause and the steps to try, in order, with the printer makers' own support pages where they cover it. Print the same test again after a fix to see whether it worked.
The five tests
- Color: cyan, magenta, yellow and black patches, their mixes, RGB primaries, ink tints from 10% to 100%, smooth gradients, two gray ramps and skin tones. Both gray ramps should look neutral. Drivers print grays in different ways (black ink only, or mixed from the color inks, balanced for the paper type you chose), so a slight tint can be normal; a clear new tint points to the paper setting or a weak ink.
- Black & white: text from 4 to 24 pt, line weights from 0.1 to 3 pt, fine line pairs at 1 to 4 per millimetre, a black-only gray ramp and a large solid black area with white text. Good for mono lasers and for checking text quality.
- Nozzle check: for each ink, fine lines, a solid bar and a 50% tint. White lines through a bar, gaps in the lines or a missing color point to clogged nozzles. It is a quick look, not a replacement for your printer's own nozzle check, which prints one line per nozzle: run that from the printer's menu, its app or the driver's maintenance tab (Canon's manual shows how to read one).
- Alignment & margins: 100 mm and 4 in scale bars across and down the page, 50 mm and 2 in squares, rulers that start at each edge of the paper, black corners for a borderless test, long straight lines, and color registration pairs where a black line meets a cyan, magenta or yellow one end to end.
- Photo: a colorful public domain (CC0) photo with reference patches in exact sRGB values, neutral gray steps and a smooth gradient.
Reading the alignment page
Measure each scale bar with a ruler. At 100% the bars are exactly 100 mm and 4 in long; a bar of 97 mm means the page printed at 97%, which almost always means Fit to page, Shrink oversized pages or a paper size mismatch (Letter selected, A4 loaded, or the reverse). If the bar across the page and the bar down the page differ, the paper may be slipping as it feeds.
Each edge has two rulers, one in millimetres and one in inches, that start at the very edge of the sheet. Most printers can't print the last few millimetres, so the start of each ruler is missing on the printout: the first tick that printed marks that edge's margin (count the 1 mm or 1/16 in ticks from the nearest number). The black corner triangles reach the paper's corners only with borderless printing, on printers and paper sizes that support it.
Inkjet or laser: why the fixes differ
An inkjet sprays ink through hundreds of tiny nozzles as the head moves across the page, so a dried nozzle leaves a thin white line along the head's path. Printer makers suggest checking the nozzle pattern first and cleaning only while it shows gaps, because each cleaning cycle uses ink: HP suggests repeating the cleaning 3 or 4 times if needed, and Epson's banding FAQ suggests 3 or 4 cycles and then leaving the printer off overnight so dried ink can soften. Canon's manual shows how a good and a bad nozzle check pattern look.
A laser or LED printer fuses toner with a drum and rollers, so its faults look different: streaks down the page, faded print from toner save or low toner, color offset, and marks that repeat at the distance of one roller's turn. Brother's print quality table for the HL-L3210CW series, for example, lists spots every 94 mm (3.7 in) as the drum and every 29 mm (1.1 in) as the toner; other models list their own distances in their manuals. Sources checked October 2026.
Tips
- Use plain white paper for the tests, and set the paper type in the print settings to match what's in the tray.
- Keep a good printout. When a problem appears later, print the same page and compare them side by side.
- Screens glow and paper reflects light, so prints always look a little darker and less saturated than a bright screen. Compare the reference patches, not just the photo. To check the screen side, run the monitor test.
- Need paper that has to print at exact size too? The graph paper and lined paper makers use the same exact-size PDFs.